Implement Tool Search Tool

[bhb]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

Implement Tool Search Tool as described by Anthopropic here.

Proposed solution

By adding defer_loading: true to most tools, the context required by the GitHub MCP server would dramatically shrink. On our team, we already limit tools to a minimal set using GITHUB_TOOLSETS but even so, the tool definitions take up 11.1% of my context on a fresh instance of Claude Code.

[tommaso-moro]

Hi @bhb thank you for raising this. We are aware of this approach and will discuss it internally. I will reach out should there be any updates on this!

As to reducing context usage, we now have a new feature which allows you to specify exactly which tools you need when configuring the GitHub MCP Server. This is especially useful if you only need some tools from a toolset, or if you need tools that belong to different toolsets (e.g. get_file_contents and issue_read)

You can use the X-MCP-Tools header in the remote MCP or the --tools flag (or GITHUB_TOOLS env var) for the local MCP to use this feature. We estimate that using a tool-specific configuration will reduce context usage by 60-90% when loading the 3-10 most popular tools. To learn more please check out:

• Our official server configuration docs
• Our latest changelog

Please let me know if you have any questions, or if you have any feedback on this :)

[bhb]

@tommaso-moro Thank you for the response. I was not aware of the GITHUB_TOOLS feature. That looks very promising for our use case. I'll try it out!

[praveenkumarlodhi979-tech]

168"57"359 kalyan Ratan results open to close 3:40 minute par uplabdh ho jana chahie aakhri update safalta prapt jarur karunga 🤗

[SamMorrowDrums]

This is actually something that needs to be done in the MCP host application and it's not something an MCP server can implement themselves.

I have experimented with this myself directly and it's very cool, but it requires host applications that actually connect to the model API to do all the heavy lifting.